


Work Backwards From Anger

by NortheastCasey



Category: The Good Wife (TV)
Genre: F/F
Language: English
Status: In-Progress
Published: 2014-09-24
Updated: 2014-09-23
Packaged: 2018-02-18 14:14:43
Rating: Not Rated
Warnings: Creator Chose Not To Use Archive Warnings
Chapters: 1
Words: 1,443
Publisher: archiveofourown.org
Story URL: https://archiveofourown.org/works/2351339
Author URL: https://archiveofourown.org/users/NortheastCasey/pseuds/NortheastCasey
Summary: <blockquote class="userstuff">
              <p>Owen walks Alicia through the maze of her denial: "start with who you are angry at, and work backwards to desire."</p>
            </blockquote>





	Work Backwards From Anger

**Author's Note:**

> My first attempt at fanfic, attempting to bridge the gap between "Not gonna happen" and "There, don't we all feel so much better?"

Owen set down his wine glass, and reached over, rubbing back and forth between his sister’s shoulders to calm her. Alicia had only slapped him once, way back when they were teenagers. “It doesn’t make you her,” was what he had said that day, “It doesn’t make you mom…” and she had reflexively swung at him, connecting with a viciousness that startled them both.

Now, almost 25 years later, he thought it again, but didn’t say it. 

Alicia stared at the wall opposite the couch, then looked down into her third glass of wine, and whispered, “I lied before.”

“Hmm?” 

“When I said I didn’t love Will.”

Owen thanked himself for being sober enough to not ask the obvious: “And if Will was still alive to be available, and difficult, and human? Could you risk loving him then? Because he was, and you didn’t.” 

He could think it though. He could send the thought from himself and through her hair and through her skull and let it knock rudely on the door of her mind. To free her, not to attack her. But lacking his mother’s cruel courage, actually saying it aloud was impossible. 

He rerouted. “You lied,” he said, blandly, not agreeing with her. “Why?” 

She opened her mouth to answer, and stopped, searching for what the answer might be. He looked down at his chest to see if his rising pulse was visible to her as it knocked against his ribs, the echoes of it tapping silently against his shirt. 

He kept his voice as unprovocative as possible, as his mind flashed back to a news story from the previous week: a group of teenagers in Nevada had accidentally blown themselves up while exploring an abandoned mine. Cases of TNT for blasting, abandoned in the passageways decades before, had rotted, destabilizing the nitroglycerin, and when the explorers had walked past, their simple stirring of the stagnant air, that introduction of new oxygen, was enough to trigger detonation.

Alicia was, admittedly, destabilized. And wasn’t everyone, to some extent? But while Owen had spent the previous twenty-five years acknowledging his demons for many a therapist, deep inside his sister, the feelings and truths that had destroyed their parents’ marriage had lain abandoned and undisturbed. Alicia was proudly untherapized. She had instead encased herself in perfectionism: the perfect wife in her perfectly-appointed home, tending her reasonably-attractive children. 

Now, on this night, on this couch, he held his breath, waiting to see if, tilted off her fixed answers by the combination of shock, grief, alcohol and middle age, his sister might finally be confronting the unexamined essence of herself: her dishonesty. And the anger that fueled it. 

\-------------------------------  
Alicia believed, and had taught her children, that that they mustn’t lie. But at the same time, her need to assure herself that she was not her mother had wrapped her in compulsive pretense before she had even hit puberty. 

And Owen had been her rationalization for that. In the strain of consoling her crying brother during an ugly, prolonged divorce, Alicia had developed a repulsion not only for their mother’s recklessness, but for the broader category of passion that Veronica used as her repeated justification for it. 

And what was passion but honesty unmitigated by responsibility? Veronica was honest about her desires, and determined that she should fulfill them. All of them. And damn the consequences to, or expectations of, her family. 

For a confused pre-teen whose home needed someone to step up and establish order, her mother’s passion and irresponsibility - and the honesty that facilitated them - became comingled into one multifaceted enemy. If Veronica had only refused to see that she wanted a fling more than she wanted stability for her children….if she had only ignored her desire to cast off the repetitiveness of married life….if only she had been more dishonest with herself really, Owen wouldn’t be crying, and Daddy wouldn’t be gone, and Alicia wouldn’t be so angry. 

And here they were, all these years later, and Owen was a hedonist, and Alicia counterbalanced him with her refusal to acknowledge in herself the human appetites that she saw only the costs of, as they drove others to their failings, and to failing her. 

Yes, Alicia would be responsible. And for her, the key to that was ignoring one’s appetites. If she refused to acknowledge the body’s desires, then the risk of them overcoming her was nullified. After enough years of that, her dutiful brand of dishonesty blinded her to her desires and thus to the motives behind her decisions, and so it was that Alicia’s critical thinking skills were deployed only on the external world.

\------------------------------------  
That much Owen knew – the general weight and effect of it. He knew that it kept her inflexible, and that she had never yet unleashed her heart to encompass anyone but her own creations – Zach and Grace. Her marriage and her friendships were as designed and dispassionate as any interior decorating plan that she had enforced on her house.

Alicia couldn’t answer about the lying. Owen rerouted again. 

“So, you loved Will. What did you love about him?”

She dropped her eyes, and her voice, “That time didn’t change the way he felt about me. The way he saw me.”

But could she connect those sentences? “What did he see?”

She clenched and unclenched her hand. She looked away. He wished her their mother’s courage, if only temporarily. He wished it and wished it for her until it came to her and she grasped it. “He saw what I…want… wanted to be…” Her eyes scanned the room, then her hands opened up in front of her, and she told herself, “…when we were 22 years old at Georgetown.”

He exhaled, for both of them. She continued, searching for words, and found them, “When nothing had been lost. He never could stand losing.” And she finally saw Will’s compulsive gambling for what it was: a denial of loss, an insistence that he couldn’t have lost because the game wasn’t over yet. Defeats were just one hand dealt and played, and perhaps played for loss intentionally – to set the opponent up for an eventual, bigger, final win by Will. 

In Will’s mental narration of life, only the wins got a period, the losses got commas – they were suspended transactions. Alicia, choosing and marrying Peter, was not someone he had lost, she was a suspended transaction, taken up again twenty years later, destined to be another win for Will. Refusing to accept the loss of her he strategized between courage and denial, that universal see-saw. 

But despite Alicia’s present-day declaration that she had loved Will, the fact was that, even way back in their twenties, the realist in her, the budding litigator in her, the potential mother in her, had recognized Will’s fundamental instability, and rejected it. She had chosen Peter, knowing that he was not besotted with her, but trusting him the more because he saw her as she was.  
Peter did cost-benefit calculations as naturally as other people blinked their eyes. His outcomes were confident, sensible. Will would perform the same analysis, but he couldn’t stop himself from flailing against fate, choosing the higher risk/reward option. 

She had rejected Will in their youth, and, after satiating her anger over Peter and Kalinda via a fling with him as her boss, she had seen through to his stunted emotional development, seen clearly that he saw only the girl she had grown out of decades prior, and she had rejected Will again. 

This was ground that Owen and Alicia had gone over, back when Kalinda brought Grace home, and Alicia told Will that their affair was over. 

\---------------------------------

Owen continued mentally guiding her through her own wreckage. “So. Will was passionately in love with you, but couldn’t see you clearly. Peter had a good grasp of who you are, but…” he stopped, not wanting to add to her bruising. Redirect. “Peter chose you with his head, and, ok, we couldda used some more heart mixed in with that.” Exhale. “Will chose you with his heart, but couldn’t let his mind see you changing. Growing.” So far, so good. 

“The question is, has anyone seen you clearly, and wanted you passionately. And if so, would you allow yourself to see that?”

Alicia stared at the floor. 

He broke down the mental equation for her. “Who are you angry at?” 

Alicia looked at him quizzically. “Well,” he explained, “if passion can only be recognized with honesty, and if, generally speaking, people honestly acknowledging their passions makes you angry, then start with who you are angry at and work backwards to desire.”


End file.
